Author: John D. (Page 74 of 202)

Ryozen Gokoku Shrine (Kyoto)

September 17, 2015 / John D.

View of Kyoto from the Ryozen area on the city’s Eastern Hills

The Ryozen Gokoku Shrine is not a name that springs to mind when thinking of Kyoto, yet it draws a continual stream of visitors. The reason is that it houses the grave of Sakamoto Ryoma, one of the great heroes of Japanese history. Indeed, some accounts consider him the architect of the Meiji Restoration which turned Japan into a modern Western-oriented country.

Ryoma Sakamoto and friend Nakaoka Shintaro

Another important aspect of Ryozen is that it was the origin of Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, as can be read in the account below. Like other Gokoku Shrines, there is a strongly patriotic atmosphere and I was bemused on my first visit to the graveyard to hear a recording being broadcast in English which turned out to be the voice of Judge Pal, who was the only dissenting voice at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (he claimed all defendants were not guilty).

The article below comes from the Yomiuri newspaper, a noted rightwing publication. It explains the lack of mention of any controversy about the nationalistic nature of the shrine’s museum. It also explains the curious usage of ‘patriot’ in the article. The term is used to refer to those who fought on the imperial side in the war of liberation against the shogunate.

Why should only those who fought on the emperor’s side be considered patriots? It’s a subtle ideological ploy by the writer and a reminder that, as the saying goes, history is written by the victors.

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Finding Ryoma in the Hereafter
Japan News September 17, 2015 By Yasuhiko Mori / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

An endless line of people visit the grave of legendary samurai Sakamoto Ryoma, commonly called Ryoma, in the Ryozen area in Higashiyama Ward, Kyoto. Next to his grave is the grave of a close associate, Nakaoka Shintaro. There are also graves of other patriots from the closing days of the Edo period (1603-1867), including Kido Takayoshi, Umeda Unpin, Maki Izumi, Hirano Kuniomi, Hashimoto Sanai and Rai Mikisaburo. Why were so many patriots buried there?

Shinto funeral rites 
The Ryozen area was originally part of Jishu Shoboji temple. Murakami Kuniyasu, who served in the Imperial court, purchased part of the premises in 1809 to use it for Shinto funeral rites and established Reimei Shrine.

The grave of Sakamoto Ryoma at the Ryozen Shrine in Kyoto

Under the religious policy of the Tokugawa shogunate during the Edo period, everyone became a parishioner of a Buddhist temple, in principle, and funerals and memorial services were conducted by temples. Shinto priests were not excluded from this rule.

“Kuniyasu apparently opposed the rule,” said Shigeki Murakami, the eighth Shinto priest of Reimei Shrine, where Kuniyasu served as the first Shinto priest. According to Murakami, based on the idea that Japan is the country of the Emperor, Kuniyasu rejected Buddhism, considering it to be a foreign religion, and only carried out Shinto-style funerals.

Retainers of Choshu domain 
During the final days of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Choshu domain — where the “sonno-joi” doctrine, which wanted to restore the Emperor while expelling “foreign barbarians,” was popular — buried its retainers who died in Kyoto at the cemetery at Reimei Shrine. The domain’s first burial at the shrine took place in 1862 when Matsuura Shodo, who was taught under Yoshida Shoin at the Shokasonjuku academy, was buried.

Following this, many supporters of the sonno-joi movement from the Choshu and other domains were buried there. That same year, the shrine conducted a rite for the souls of the supporters of the movement who died during and after the Ansei no taigoku purge, or the suppression by the shogunate of those who did not support its policies in the late 1850s.

There is a record showing that Kusaka Genzui, who was a key figure among supporters of the sonno-joi movement in the Choshu domain and is known to have met Ryoma, asked the shrine to perform memorial services for his ancestors for the rest of time.

“Dream” – the inspirational Ryoma Sakamoto ema at the shrine

Reimei Shrine was regarded as a holy place among supporters of the sonno-joi movement, according to Kiyoshi Takano, a novelist who is familiar with the history of Kyoto during the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate.

On Nov. 15, 1867, of the lunar calendar, Ryoma and Nakaoka were assassinated at the Omiya shop and inn in the Kawaramachi district of Kyoto, and their bodies were transported to Reimei Shrine in the evening of the 17th by their associates, including Kaientai, a corporation established by Ryoma. There is a record showing that the shrine conducted a Shinto funeral rite for them before burying them. In some cases, shrines enshrine only the souls of the dead, but Ryoma and others were actually buried at the site.

Managed by Shokonsha shrine
The Meiji government, launched following the Imperial restoration, established Shokonsha shrine at the Reimei Shrine’s cemetery in 1868 to enshrine the souls of people who died because of the chaotic state of affairs after the arrival of U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853, as well as of the war dead in and after the Battle of Toba-Fushimi in 1868.

In 1877, the government confiscated most of the Reimei Shrine’s cemetery and precinct, and had the government-owned Shokonsha shrine manage them. Shokonsha shrine was later renamed to what it is currently known as, Kyoto Ryozen Gokoku Shrine.

“I want to be the present-day Sakamoto Ryoma,” runs a heartfelt tribute at his grave

During that time, Tokyo Shokonsha shrine was established in the Kudan district of Tokyo, and the enshrined “divine spirits” in the Shokonsha shrine and the Reimei Shrine in Kyoto were moved to the Tokyo shrine. Tokyo Shokonsha shrine was later renamed Yasukuni Shrine.

This means it is possible to revere Ryoma at Yasukuni Shrine, but if you really want to show your esteem for the legendary samurai, visit Ryozen, where his remains are buried.

Influence of Emperor Kokaku
Murakami Kuniyasu, who established Reimei Shrine, served the Imperial court ruled by Emperor Kokaku, whose reign was from 1779 to 1817.

Emperor Kokaku was a descendant of the Kanin-no-miya branch of the Imperial family, but he revived a range of rituals of the Imperial court, which were lost in the medieval period, in an attempt to restore the authority of the Imperial court. Such efforts had an impact on the sonno-joi movement later.

The origin of the Gakushuin schools lies with Emperor Kokaku. The emperor planned to establish an educational institution for sons of kuge aristocratic class families, similar to the daigakuryo (university) in the Heian period (late eighth century to early 12th century). While the plan was not realized during his reign, it was decided that such an institution would be established in 1842 when Emperor Ninko, Kokaku’s successor, was on the throne. The institution was the Gakushuin school, and it was located south of Kyoto Imperial Palace until the first year of the Meiji era. The Gakushuin school in Tokyo was established in 1877.

Worshippers at Ryoma’s grave, before which handwritten tributes are placed. Unusually he was not only given a Shinto funeral but his body was buried in the shrine’s cemetery.

Great things about Japan

September 17, 2015 / John D.

Green Shinto friend Amy Chavez has written an article for Rocket News in which she lists 17 positive things about Japan. Here’s her listing…

1) Returning favours
2) Thanking people
3) Politeness
4) Putting others first
5) Including everyone in the group
6) Respect for property
7) Drunkenness doesn’t lead to violence
8) Peace mentality
9) Govt run business works
10) Being less assertive
11) Being a good listener
12) Being less nationalistic
13) Gambaru (doing your best)
14) Commitment and keeping promises
15) Being a good citizen
16) Doing things with grace
17) Being on time

I find myself almost in total agreement with Amy here, though the only item in the list I might quibble about is no. 12. Personally I think Japanese have a strong sense of nationhood, but they don’t allow themselves to express it as openly as others because of WW2. It’s true they have a peace constitution, but this was imposed by the Americans and reinforces the sense of uniqueness (expressed in a plethora of books known as nihonjinron). As others have pointed out, Japanese ‘internationalism’ is actually a form of nationalism, for the fascination with other cultures serves as a way of defining themselves as special.

One symptom of Japan’s nationalism is the strong sense of homogeneity. Just look at how many asylum seekers Japan takes in – would any other developed nation be allowed to get away with as few as twelve in a year!!!? Racial attachment makes perfect sense in a Japanese context since, as Amy herself points out, belonging to a group is a key characteristic of the Japanese. And the nation as a whole is simply the ultimate Japanese group.

Whatever one thinks about Japanese and patriotism, there are still 16 great attributes in Amy’s listing that command admiration. It’s my belief that these virtues (and the patriotism) are deeply rooted in Shinto values. Gratitude, for instance, is said to be fundamental to Shinto and is expressed throughout the culture at large. It makes living in Japan such a gratifying experience. Another cardinal virtue of Shinto is sincerity, meaning that doing one’s best, keeping promises, contributing to the group and being on time are treasured. Cynicism and alienation are largely lacking.

Shinto is also a deeply communal practice, which emphasises the well-being of the group/village/rice-growing community. It sees human beings as part of nature, subservient to its destructive power and seasonal blessings, therefore the ego is suppressed in the face of the common good. It’s worth noting here that the Shinto symbol of a mirror is ‘kagami‘ in Japanese, whereas kami is the mirror without the ‘ga‘ (ego). This stands in contrast to the individualism of the West, which has resulted in societies in which the promotion of self is much more prominent.

As for the grace and elegance of life in Japan, one might presume this comes from the trickle-down effect of the aesthetics of Heian nobility, in which elegance was elevated into an all-important social attribute. But could this too be linked with Shinto? The importance of form in its rituals and objects of worship was examined in a recent Green Shinto posting (see The Art of Shinto).

It’s the social cohesion and consideration of Japanese for others that makes living in this country so wonderful. For myself it remains an almost daily source of joy, and it’s something that always impresses tourists to the country. It even impressed the first Western missionaries who came to Japan in the sixteenth century. How have the Japanese managed to maintain such high standards of social intercourse? Theories abound, but for myself I strongly suspect it’s something to do with living in a ‘kami no kuni’ – a land of spirits.

Norito book review

September 13, 2015 / John D.

Norito being read during a ritual at Kamigamo Jinja

Norito being read out during a shrine ritual

During Shinto rituals formal prayers or declarations are made, which are known as norito. They first appear in the Kojiki (712) and in the Nihongi (720). But they are best-known from the Engi-shiki (927), in which the customs and regulations concerning ritual practice were compiled.

The archaic language of the norito means that in parts they are barely comprehensible to modern Japanese. In this respect they are similar to Latin in the old-style Catholic services. Proponents claim that the incomprehensibility adds to the mystical nature of the ritual, and that in the sounds themselves is an inherent beauty (in Shinto’s case the claim is that the sounds are imbued with kotodama, or word spirit).

For foreign followers of Shinto, there’s a curious dilemma in whether to use the Japanese or English version of the norito. Quite apart from the comprehensibility of the Japanese, wrong pronunciation will rob the language of kotodama. On the other hand, modern English translation will clearly have neither authenticity nor mystery. And then there’s the thorny issue of what language an overseas kami might use!

The classic English version of norito is by Donald L. Philippi, and the Japan Times has recently carried a short book review…

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Norito, Translated by Donald L. Philippi 136 pages Princeton University Press

The norito (ritual prayers) found in the 10th-century Engi-shiki (“Procedures of the Engi Era”) have fascinated Japanologists for over a century.

In the introduction to his 1878 translation of the norito, Ernest Satow suggested that they could offer insight into “the rites practiced by the Japanese people before the introduction of Buddhism and Chinese philosophy.” More recently, they have also attracted attention from linguists interested in the earliest attested stages of the Japanese language.

Donald L. Philippi’s Norito: A Translation of the Ancient Japanese Ritual Prayers, originally published in 1959, walks a line between literal fidelity and readability that will be familiar to readers of his translations of the Kojiki or Ainu yukar (folk tales), which are both sadly out of print. In particular, Philippi’s use of indent levels to show parallel and nested phrases makes it so easy to grasp the intricate structures involved that compared to the unbroken paragraphs of the original this translation almost feels like cheating.

The 1990 edition from Princeton University Press contains a preface by religious historian Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa that is well worth reading in its own right. Kitagawa argue for a view of the prayers as a product of the early Japanese state as it “came under the massive influence of Chinese civilization and Buddhism.”

Norito being read out by a priest during a Shinto ritual

Irreligious Japan?

September 12, 2015 / John D.

Interesting Quote of the Day in Japan Today (Sep. 11, 2015)

“Visiting a shrine to pray is different from being religious. It has nothing to do with religion. Most Japanese, including me, don’t think about whether we’re religious or not.”

A torii marks the entrance to another world, yet paying respects at graves is not thought of as being ‘religious’

The quote is by Yasunori Ueda, who visits the Ise Grand Shrine every summer to pray for his family and good health. Japan is one of the world’s least religious countries, according to a Gallup survey this year, but people of all ages continue to visit shrines at pivotal moments in their lives. (Christian Science Monitor)

One could explain the quote by reference to tourism, with Japanese behaving simply as people who visit churches in Britain out of historical and architectural interest. Such people might lower their voices as a sign of respect, even if they’re atheist.

Yet I’ve met several Japanese who vocally profess to be non-religious but neverthesless pray at shrines and graves. What’s going on? I think it has to do with the deep-seated nature of “ancestor worship” in Japanese culture, which is traditionally not seen as a religion but a natural process of mourning. ‘Thus men forget that All deities reside in the human breast,’ as noted by that most mystical of poets, William Blake.

You see the same kind of thing continually in American movies, where people visit graves and talk to their dead friends or family. No one calls that a religion either. It’s more like a deep sense of connection between the living and the dead. Their spirits live on in our memory and continue to play a real part in governing our lives. It’s what Lafcadio Hearn so eloquently pointed out in Japan. An Attempt at Interpretation, and the book remains a classic precisely because it does so much to explain the religious/irreligious nature of Japan.

Paying respects, even praying at an emperor’s grave is not seen as a religious act.

The art of Shinto

September 10, 2015 / John D.

One of the great appeals of Shinto is the attractiveness of the aesthetics involved. These extend to the architecture, the clothing, the religious tools, the rituals, the offerings, even the festivals. And along with these are the performances of dance and music for the entertainment of the kami.

The perfection of the aesthetic aspect is part of the Japanese cult of beauty. It’s often said that the culture is not characterised by an intellectual or moral slant. Aesthetics not ethics is the national bent.

Appreciation of beauty can evoke a sense of the sublime that is spiritual in nature. It’s not surprising then that religion and the arts are closely linked. As Keats said, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

In the passage below, taken from Maria Popova’s Brainpickings website, mention is made of how art inculcates wonder. Given that Shinto is a religion of awe, it can be seen how closely appreciation of art is intertwined with the religious impulse. True beauty leads to a sense of transcendence. Ars longa vita brevis.

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Alain de Botton writes in How Proust Can Change Your Life: “For Proust, the great artists deserve acclaim because they show us the world in a way that is fresh, appreciative, and alive… The opposite of art, for Proust, is something he calls habit. For Proust, much of life is ruined for us by a blanket or shroud of familiarity that descends between us and everything that matters. It dulls our senses and stops us appreciating everything, from the beauty of a sunset to our work and our friends.

Children don’t suffer from habit, which is why they get excited by some very key but simple things – like puddles, jumping on the bed, sand, and fresh bread. But we adults get ineluctably spoiled, which is why we seek ever more powerful stimulants, like fame and love.

The trick, in Proust’s eyes, is to recover the powers of appreciation of a child in adulthood, to strip the veil of habit and therefore to start to look upon daily life with a new and more grateful sensitivity.

This, for Proust, is what one group in the population does all the time: artists. Artists are people who strip habit away and return life to its deserved glory.”

True art reawakens us to the wonder of everyday life and appreciation of the sheer marvel of existence that lies even in the most banal of occurrences.

Book publication: Yasukuni

September 8, 2015 / John D.

Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar by Akiko Takenaka
published by the University of Hawaii Press and in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University Press.

Book description from the Press:

This is the first extensive English-language study of Yasukuni Shrine as a war memorial. It explores the controversial shrine’s role in waging war, promoting peace, honoring the dead, and, in particular, building Japan’s modern national identity. It traces Yasukuni’s history from its conceptualization in the final years of the Tokugawa period and Japan’s wars of imperialism to the present.

Author Akiko Takenaka departs from existing scholarship on Yasukuni by considering various themes important to the study of war and its legacies through a chronological and thematic survey of the shrine, emphasizing the spatial practices that took place both at the shrine and at regional sites associated with it over the last 150 years. Rather than treat Yasukuni as a single, unchanging ideological entity, she takes into account the social and political milieu, maps out gradual transformations in both its events and rituals, and explicates the ideas that the shrine symbolizes.

Takenaka illuminates the ways the shrine’s spaces were used during wartime, most notably in her reconstructions, based on primary sources, of visits by war-bereaved military families to the shrine during the Asia-Pacific War. She also traces important episodes in Yasukuni’s postwar history, including the filing of lawsuits against the shrine and recent attempts to reinvent it for the twenty-first century. Through a careful analysis of the shrine’s history over one and a half centuries, her work views the making and unmaking of a modern militaristic Japan through the lens of Yasukuni Shrine.

Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar is a skilled and innovative examination of modern and contemporary Japan’s engagement with the critical issues of war, empire, and memory. It will be of particular interest to readers of Japanese history and culture as well as those who follow current affairs and foreign relations in East Asia. Its discussion of spatial practices in the life of monuments and the political use of images, media, and museum exhibits will find a welcome audience among those engaged in memory, visual culture, and media studies.

10 black & white illustrations. 296pp. July 2015. ISBN: 978-0-8248-4678-7.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Mobilizing Death: Developing the Myth of Yasukuni
Institutionalizing Joy: Turning War into Spectacle at Yasukuni Shrine
Networks of Grief and Pride: Yasukuni Shrine in Regional Japan
Institutionalizing Grief: Yasukuni Shrine and Total War
Who has the Right to Mourn? Politics of Enshrinement at Yasukuni Shrine
Mobilizing Memories: Postmemorial Conservatism at Yasukuni Today
Epilogue: Contesting Memories: Yasukuni Shrine as a Countermonument

Author information:
Akiko Takenaka is associate professor of Japanese History at the University of Kentucky.

Syncretism 2) Umehara

August 19, 2015 / John D.

A priest from Fushimi Inari at the gate of Toji temple, for which the shrine has throughout history acted as tutelary guardian

A priest from Fushimi Inari purifies the priests of Toji temple

The question of what exactly constitutes the Japanese tradition remains pertinent to the current debate over what direction Shinto should take. Some arguments are informed by State Shinto, some by the syncretism of Edo times, some by a mythical time before ‘foreign Chinese elements’ arrived.

One of the leading Shinto theorists is the conservative scholar Takeshi Umehara (born 1925), former director of of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Unlike others on the right, he does not favour a return to the values of the prewar era, and in the passage below he argues against the idea that the Meiji Constitution and Rescript on Education (1889/1990) were more Japanese than the present postwar constitution. It was translated for Japan Focus by Yusei Ota and Gavan McCormack, and posted in Japan Focus on July 12, 2005.

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Takeshi Umehara writes…

From the time of Prince Shotoku [574-622], Buddhism was Japan’s official religion, but it soon merged with Shinto, the religion of the Japanese people from Jomon [neolithic] times. The merger of Shinto and Buddhism, started by Gyoki [668-749] and Saicho [767-822], and perfected with Kukai’s [774-835] esoteric Buddhism (Shingon-Mikkyo), lasted as Japan’s tradition until the end of Edo.

However, as the Meiji government fell under the ideological sway of narrow-minded “National Learning” (Kokugaku) scholars, they set about implementing policies designed to separate the Kami and the Buddha and to demolish Buddhism. In the end they killed off not only the Buddha but the Kami too, and in the space created by the absence of both Buddha and Kami they set the emperor as the new divinity. This process may be described as the creation of “New Shinto” [or State Shinto].

Torii and pagoda, two symbols of Japanese religion, here ranged syncretically next to each other

Torii and pagoda, symbols of Shinto and Buddhism, here complement each other within the grounds of Toji temple

This New Shinto contributed to making Japan a power comparable to the Western states, by internally consolidating the political control of the Satsuma-Choshu-led government that replaced the Tokugawa shogunate and by externally focusing the power of the whole nation under the emperor.

The philosopher, Watsuji Tetsuro [1889-1960], set out in his war-time book The Philosophy and Tradition of the Philosophy of Revering the Emperor to prove that the ideology of seeing the Emperor as a god was a Japanese tradition, but he was not successful.

The idea of the Emperor as a deity can be seen in the Kojiki and Manyoshu (8th century) and in texts such as the Jinno Shotoki (14th century), but it was not until after the middle of the Edo period (circa mid-17th century) that such ideas became popular and they were then utilized in the process of overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate.

Under such religion, Japan developed as a modern state, became a great power, plunged into the “fifteen year war”, and met the miserable fate of defeat. Bertrand Russell raised the question of how Japan, where no one was allowed to question the divinity of the head of state, could have become a modern state.   After the war, under the orders of General MacArthur New Shinto was rejected, and an edict declaring the humanity of the Showa emperor [Hirohito] was issued. It seems bizarre that, in the 20th century where scientific thinking dominated the world, the Emperor should have had to issue an edict declaring himself human.

I met the Showa Emperor several times and could not help seeing him as a genial old man who loved the study of biology. How painful it must have been for such a person to play the role of a god. Mishima Yukio totally rejected the announcement of the emperor’s humanity and wrote in his novel Voices of the Heroic Spirits (Eireitachi no koe) that the emperor should have insisted on his divinity.

enmusubi tree in a Buddhist temple (Gojo-in)

An enmsubi (good relations) tree, associated with Shinto but here within a Buddhist temple, indicative of the way the two religions are tied together

I believe, however, that the real modern Japan started from this declaration of the emperor’s humanity.   The fact of the present emperor alluding to Takano-no-Niikasa, the mother of Emperor Kanmu and the descendant of King Bunei of Paekche, by saying that he “feels an affinity for Korea” and telling the zealous promoters of the movement to raise the Hinomaru (national flag) and sing the Kimigayo (anthem) that “it is best for them not to be imposed by force” – something that even a liberal academic could not easily say – leads me to think that the members of the imperial family are very liberal, and probably are themselves inclined to oppose the kind of Emperor system spelled out in the Imperial Rescript on Education.

Let me repeat. The Imperial Rescript on Education is not something rooted in Japanese tradition. Is it not rather the case that revival of the Imperial Rescript on Education would allow politicians who have neither knowledge nor virtue, and who have no love whatever for traditional culture but care only for their self-interest, to make the people do their will by representing it as the order of the emperor? It seems to me that the only way to make the Japanese people truly moral is to have them come to a deep understanding of the Japanese tradition of reverence for both Kami and Buddha.

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Umehara Takeshi, long the director of the International Research Center for Japanese Culture (Nichibunken) in Kyoto, is the author of numerous works on Japanese and Asian philosophy, archeology and history. For other essays by Umehara, see Japan Focus No. 135 and 167.

Umehara claims the 7th century Ritsuryo state was the beginning of State Shinto, with texts and rituals modelled on Taoism. He also thinks ‘original Shinto” is preserved in the fringes of Japan in the Ryukyu and Ainu traditions which are marked by outdoor rather than shrine worship – an inspiration for all free spirits who reject the nationalism of modern Shinto and wish to return to the roots of the religion.

Shinto priest purifying Buddhist priests at the Awata Jinja festival

Shinto priest at the Awata Jinja festival purifying Buddhist priests, who chant sutra in response

For part 1 of this two-part series on syncretism, please click here to read of how the poet Saigyo and the essayist Kamo no Chomei practised worship of kami and buddhas.